by Jack Mars
As a general rule, Audrey St. John frowned upon work. She didn’t understand it, and she especially didn’t understand why someone would do the kind of dangerous, dirty work that occupied Luke Stone’s time. She seemed continually flabbergasted that her own daughter, Rebecca St. John, would marry someone like Luke.
Audrey and Lance had never accepted him as their son-in-law. They had been a toxic influence on this relationship since well before he and Becca exchanged their vows. Her presence here was going to make it that much harder to talk to Becca about this latest assignment.
“Hi, Audrey,” Luke said, trying to sound cheerful.
He had just walked in. He had taken off his tie and unbuttoned the top two buttons of his dress shirt, but so far that was his only nod toward being home. He reached into the refrigerator and came out with a cold beer.
It was full summer now, and the weather was fine. The surroundings here were beautiful. He and Becca were living at her family’s cabin in Queen Anne’s County. The house had been in the family for over a hundred years.
The place was an ancient, rustic place sitting on a small bluff right above the bay. It was two floors, wooden everything, with creaks and squeaks everywhere you stepped. The kitchen door was spring-loaded, and slammed shut with enthusiasm. There was a screened-in porch facing the water, and a newer stone patio with commanding views right on the bluff.
They had started gradually replacing the generations-old furniture to make the place more suited for everyday living. There was a new sofa and new chairs in the living room. One Saturday morning, by hook or by crook, and by sheer animal will, Luke and Ed Newsam had managed to insert a king-sized bed in the upstairs master bedroom.
Even with those upgrades, the sturdiest thing in the house remained the stone fireplace in the living room. It was almost as if the stately old hearth had been there, looking out over Chesapeake Bay since biblical times, and someone with a sense of humor had built a small summer cabin all around it.
It really was an incredible place. Luke loved it there. Yes, it was far from his office. Yes, if the SRT job really did pan out, and it looked like it was going to, they were going to have to move closer. But for now? Paradise. The ninety-minute commute home didn’t seem nearly as bad, just knowing that this was the payoff at the end of it.
He glanced out the window. Becca was on the patio, feeding the baby. Luke would have loved nothing more than to take a seat out there with them, gaze out at the water and the sky, and just sit there until the sun went down. But it wasn’t to be. Unfortunately, he had to pack for his trip. And before he even started, he had to do the hardest thing—announce that he was going.
“Did you get punched on the job?” Audrey said.
Luke shrugged. Even though he could feel them well enough, he had almost forgotten the scrape on his cheek and the swollen jaw line. Pain was an old friend of his. When it wasn’t excruciating, he could barely feel it. There was almost something comforting about it.
He cracked open the beer and took a slug. It was ice cold and delicious. “Something like that. But you should see the other guy.”
Audrey didn’t laugh. She made a sort of half-grunt and went upstairs.
Luke was tired. It had already been a long day, with Martinez laid to rest, the fight with Murphy, and everything else. And really, it was just getting started. He intended to be here for an hour before he headed right back to the city again, from there to Turkey, and then, if all the signs were favorable, over to Russia.
He went outside. Becca nursing the baby was like an impressionist painting, her bright red jumper and floppy sun hat against the green grass, and the vast sweep of pale blue sky and dark water. There was a double-mast tall ship replica at full sail in the distance, moving slowly to the west. If he could press STOP and freeze this moment in time, he would do it.
She looked up, saw him there, and smiled. Her smile lit him up. She was as pretty as ever. And a smile was a good thing, especially these days. Maybe the darkness of this postpartum depression was beginning to lift.
Luke took a deep breath, sighed quietly, and smiled himself.
“Hello, beautiful,” he said.
“Hello, handsome.”
He leaned down and shared a kiss with her.
“How’s the baby boy today?”
She nodded. “Good. He slept for three hours, Mom kept an eye on him, and I even got to take a nap. I don’t want to promise anything, but we might be turning a corner here. I hope so.”
A long pause drew out between them.
“You’re home early,” she said. That was the second time in the past five minutes someone had said that. He took it as a bad omen. “How did your day go?”
Luke sat down across the small round table from her and took a sip of his beer. As always, he believed that when trouble was brewing, the thing to do was to get right to the meat of it. And if he could get past the worst of it, maybe it would happen too fast for Audrey to come out here and pile on.
“Well, I have an assignment.”
He noticed himself fudging. He didn’t call it a mission. He didn’t call it an operation. What kind of assignment was it? Was he going to interview a local craftsman for the weekly newspaper? Maybe it was a high school science project?
Instantly, she was wary.
Her eyes stared deep into his, searching there. “What is it?”
He shrugged. “It’s a diplomatic snafu, really. The Russians took three American archaeologists prisoner, and confiscated their little submarine. They were diving in the Black Sea, looking for the wreck of an old trading ship from ancient Greece. They were in international waters, but the Russians felt they were too close to Russian territory.”
Her eyes never wavered. “Are they spies?”
Luke took another sip of his beer. He let out a sound, a short bark of laughter. She was good at this. She’d already had a lot of practice. She went right for the open vein.
He shook his head. “You know I can’t tell you that.”
“And you’re going to go where, and do what?”
He shrugged. “I’m going to Turkey, to see if we can get them released.” The statement was true, as far as it went. It also overlooked an entire continent’s worth of detail. It was a sin of omission.
And she also knew that. “To see if we can get them released? Who are we ?”
Now it was a chess match. “The United States of America.”
“Come on, Luke. What are you not telling me?”
He sipped the beer again and scratched his head. “Nothing of substance, hon. The Russians are holding three guys. I’m going to Turkey. They want me there because I have experience in the kind of mission that led to this. If the Russians are willing to negotiate, I probably won’t even be directly involved.”
Behind Luke, the screen door slammed. Becca’s eyes looked past him for a second. Dammit! Here came Audrey.
Becca’s eyes were suddenly angry. Tears welled up in them. No! The timing couldn’t be worse. “Luke, the last time you went abroad, I was almost nine months pregnant. You were going to Iraq to arrest someone, remember? A police job, I think you called it. But it turned out you were going to rescue the president’s…”
He raised a finger. “Becca, you know that isn’t true. I did go to arrest someone, and the arrest was uneventful…”
That was a lie. Another lie. The arrest was a slaughterhouse.
“…daughter from Islamic terrorists. Your helicopter crashed. You and Ed fought Al Qaeda militants on a mountaintop.”
“All of that happened after we were already there.”
“I’m not stupid, Luke. I can read between the lines of newspaper reports. The articles admitted that dozens of people were killed. That tells me there was a bloodbath and you were right in the middle of it.”
Luke raised his hands a tiny amount, as if she had just pulled the world’s tiniest gun on him. The baby was still there, suckling away as if none of this was happening.
“It’s
an assignment, hon. It’s my job. Don Morris…”
Now she raised a finger. “Don’t you Don Morris me. I don’t even blame Don anymore. If you didn’t want to go on these suicide missions, then he couldn’t get you to go. It’s really that simple.”
Now she was crying, the tears pouring down.
“What’s going on?” a voice said. The voice was too eager. It sensed blood in the water, and was moving in for the kill.
“Hi, Audrey,” Luke said, without even turning around.
Becca stood and handed Audrey the baby. She looked down at Luke, her eyes hard. Her entire body was shaking now from the tears.
“What if you die?” she said. “We have a son now.”
“I know that. I’m not going to die. As always, I’m going to be very careful. Even more so now, because of Gunner.”
Becca stood there next to her mother, her hands balled up in fists. She looked like a toddler who was about to start shrieking in the middle of the supermarket. Her mother, in contrast, was calm, simpering, self-satisfied. She bounced the baby in her thin, birdlike arms and cooed to him in quiet baby talk.
“It’s going to be okay,” Luke said. “It’s going to be fine. I know it is.”
Abruptly, Becca stormed off, up the small hill toward the house. A moment later, the screen door slammed again.
Now Luke and Audrey stared at each other. Audrey had the sharp, predatory eyes of a hawk. Her mouth opened.
Luke raised a hand and shook his head. “Audrey, please don’t say a word.”
Audrey ignored him. “One day, you’re going to come back here and you’re not going to have a wife anymore,” she said. “Or a house to live in, for that matter.”
CHAPTER SIX
8:35 p.m. Eastern Standard Time
The Skies Above the Atlantic Ocean
“Rock and roll,” Mark Swann said.
“Hip-hop, son,” Ed Newsam said. “Hip-hop.”
He held his big hand out across the narrow aisle of the small jet plane and Swann gave him a smooth, slow tap. Then Swann turned his own hand over and Ed appeared to place a few coins in Swann’s palm. They had just acted out the whole “gimme five, keep the change” brother man hand jive.
Since the last mission, Newsam and Swann had become unlikely friends.
Luke watched them. Ed lounged in his seat, steely-eyed, huge, neatly dressed in khaki cargo pants and a form-fitting SRT T-shirt. Ed’s job was weapons and tactics. Both his hair and his beard were close-cropped and the edges perfectly even. He looked exactly like what he was—no one to mess with.
Meanwhile, Swann looked like anything other than a federal agent. His wore black-framed glasses. His hair was pulled into a long ponytail. He wore a T-shirt that said BLACK FLAG, with a photo of a man diving from a stage into a swarming crowd. He stretched his long legs out into the aisle, an old pair of ripped jeans on his skinny legs, with a pair of bright yellow Chuck Taylors as an obstacle for any passersby. His feet were huge.
The two men had originally bonded over a love of the 1980s rap group Public Enemy, and a similar sarcastic sense of humor. Now they were bonding over God only knew what. Youthful male energy? Unlimited possibility?
The guys were enjoying themselves, ramping up for another trip to the back of beyond. That was good. These guys needed to be dialed in and razor sharp.
Luke himself didn’t feel half as much enthusiasm. He felt exhausted, more emotionally than physically. Of course, he was the only one here with a newborn baby, an angry wife, and a conniving mother-in-law. He was also the only one who had made the three-hour round trip out to the Eastern Shore and back.
Newsam and Swann had gone to Red Lobster instead. It seemed like they might have had a few drinks with their seafood dinner.
“Are you guys ready to work?” Luke said.
Ed shrugged. “Born ready.”
“Rock and roll,” Swann said again.
The six-seat Lear jet screamed north and east across the sky. The jet was dark blue with no markings of any kind. They’d left from a small private airport west of the city twenty minutes earlier. This could be a corporate plane on a business trip, or a bunch of rich kids off on a European romp.
Behind them and to their left was the last of the early evening sunlight. Ahead and to their right was the onrushing night.
Luke felt like he often felt at moments like this—as though he was plunging into something beyond his understanding. The missions didn’t bother him. He was nervous, but not really afraid. He had seen so much combat now that very few things shook his confidence. What he didn’t understand was the context.
Why? Why were they doing this? Why did the major players do what they did? Why were there terrorists and terrorist groups? Why were Russia and America, and numerous other countries, always entangled behind the scenes, pulling strings and manipulating the action like puppet masters?
When he was younger, these questions had never bothered him. Understanding geopolitics was not part of his job description. Good guys over here, bad guys over there.
He would deliberately misquote the line from the famous poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” “Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do or die.” Rather than “theirs,” he would make it “ours.” For years, he had used it as a motto of sorts.
But now he wanted to know more. It was no longer enough to kill and die for reasons that were never explained. It was possible that Martinez’s suicide had finally rammed that home for him.
For the moment, the source of most of his knowledge was a woman nearly ten years younger than him. He glanced back at Trudy Wellington, the science and intel officer, sitting one row behind them.
She was dressed casually in jeans, a blue T-shirt, and pink socks. The T-shirt had two short words across the front, in small white lettering: Be Nice. She had kicked off her sneakers when they got on the plane. She was curled up with a clipboard, a thick file folder, and a bunch of paperwork. She pored through it, marking things with a pen. She had hardly spoken since the plane had taken off.
Sensing Luke staring at her, she looked up with big eyes behind her round red glasses. She was beautiful.
Trudy… what went on inside that mind of hers?
“Yes?” she said.
Luke smiled. “I thought you might want to fill us in on what we’re all doing here. They told us next to nothing at the briefing, most of it being classified. Once Don took the mission, he said you would know what was going on by the time we got airborne.”
Ed and Swann were watching them now.
“And we are officially airborne,” Swann said.
Luke glanced out his window again. The sun was well behind them now, the day fading into nothingness. Hours from now, as they moved further east, the sky would begin to brighten. He checked his watch. Nearly nine o’clock.
“What do you say, Trudy? Ready to school us kids?”
Trudy made a bizarre sort of military salute with her right hand. It was awful. Luke did not glance back at Ed for fear of laughing.
“Ready, captain.”
She stood and moved to the forward seat so that the four of them were together.
“I’m going to assume that none of you have any prior knowledge of this mission, the people involved, the current state of our relationship with Russia, or the task placed before us,” she said. “It might make this conversation a little longer than necessary, it might not. But it tends to guarantee we’re all on the same page. Sound okay?”
Luke nodded. “Good.”
“Sounds okay,” Ed said.
“It’s a long flight,” Swann said.
Trudy nodded. “Then let’s begin.”
She paused, took a deep breath, and looked at the page in front of her. Then she launched into her story.
* * *
“Earlier today our time, yesterday their time, the Russians seized the American research submersible Nereus from international waters in the Black Sea. The confrontation took place about one hundred forty-five m
iles southeast of the Crimean resort of Yalta. Yes, where the famous World War Two meeting took place between FDR, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin.”
Ed Newsam smiled. “That’s some deep history right there.”
“FDR?” Swann said. “The guy who got assassinated in, uh… Denver?”
Trudy smiled. She almost seemed to blush. Luke shook his head and almost laughed out loud. Tough crowd for a history lesson.
“Nereus was a sitting duck. A Russian destroyer tracked its location from the time it dropped from its mother ship. The destroyer and two smaller ships from the Russian Coast Guard converged on Nereus . Once they had it hemmed in, they dropped three bathyscaphes, which surrounded Nereus at close quarters, and escorted it to the surface. They also took the crew into custody.”
“Who are they?” Luke said.
Trudy sifted through her files and brought a different paper to the top.
“A crew of three. The sub’s pilot is forty-four-year-old Peter Bolger, official residence Falmouth, Massachusetts. Graduate of Maine Maritime Academy, class of 1983. Four years in the Coast Guard, honorable discharge 1987, rank of lieutenant. Spent nearly a decade piloting ships for Wood’s Hole Oceanographic Institution in Cape Cod, in cooperation with numerous colleges, universities, and aquariums. Hired by Poseidon Research International, November 1996. To the naked eye, this is a civilian who has spent his entire adult life on the water, much of that conducting research. The presence of someone like Bolger is probably meant to give PRI a veneer of reality.”
“He’ll probably be the weak link when it comes to getting them out,” Luke said.
Trudy nodded. “According to his dossier, he is five foot nine, and weighs two hundred thirty or two hundred forty pounds.”
“How does he fit in the sub?” Swann said.
Ed shrugged. “Could be all muscle.”
Now Trudy shook her head. “It isn’t.” She held up a photo of Peter Bolger. He wasn’t morbidly obese, but he wasn’t going to run the hundred-yard dash, either.
